September 1 • 2019 The Mail on Sunday^
W
HO could have
guessed that
Boris Johnson’s
brave and cor-
rect decision to
prorogue Par-
liament for four
weeks would serve up so many
rich and enjoyable ironies for the
British people? What pleasure he
has inadvertently given us.
There is Shadow Chancellor John
McDonnell denouncing him for
acting like a Second World War
dictator when Joseph Stalin has
long been one of McDonnell’s per-
sonal heroes.
The hard-Left Labour movement
Momentum has promised to
unleash chaos by blocking bridges
and motorways. Their aim? To stop
‘the chaos’ of a No Deal Brexit.
We have had Shadow Home Sec-
retary Diane Abbott denouncing
Boris as a Latin American dictator,
when she and her boss Jeremy
Corbyn never once denounced
Fidel Castro, a genuine Latin Amer-
ican dictator.
It is not just the dedicated Left
engaging in such hysteria.
We have had Hugh Grant trying
to pretend that his children’s future
will be affected more by Brexit
than by the estimated £65.5 million
he has (quite properly and com-
mendably) amassed as an actor.
Meanwhile, the supposedly politi-
cally neutral Speaker of the House
of Commons, John Bercow, has
been speaking of the constitutional
‘outrage’ of prorogation and that
he will fight it ‘with every bone in
my body’. It turns out, of course,
that his own officials – who know
far more about the constitution
than he ever will – have told him
repeatedly that it is he who is pro-
posing to act unconstitutionally.
But perhaps the most ridiculous
claims of all have been made by
fellow historians, people who really
ought to know better.
They include Sir Richard Evans,
formerly Regius professor of His-
tory at Cambridge, who has done
his best in the past few days to
prove the saying that there is no
one so stupid as an intellectual.
He drew on the analogy of Adolf
Hitler and the Reichstag fire –
the Nazi arson attack which closed
Germany’s parliament in Berlin
in 1933, a month after Hitler was
sworn in as Chancellor.
Sir Richard did not mention,
however, that Boris is allowing
debates and votes aplenty in a
rather un-Hitlerian manner when
Parliament returns in October.
One wonders what language peo-
ple like Evans would use if there
were ever a genuine threat of a
fascist takeover in this country.
They have drained the political
lexicon dry.
If this prorogation is really the
coup d’etat that the celebrities,
arch-Remainers and luvvies are
so dramatically denouncing, do
they not think that Boris would
simply have extended it a fortnight
until after October 31 once we had
officially left the EU? So caught
up in their own hysteria, this point
seems lost on them.
Instead we have the exquisitehypocrisy of Sir John Major threat-
ening to go to court to declare
illegal something that he himself
did to get out of a political fix
in both 1992 and in 1997, and of
Corbyn denouncing as an outrage
something that Clement Attlee did
for a similar reason in 1948.Another great irony is that the
people who are bleating loudest
about the so-called affront to the
ancient powers of Parliament are
precisely the same people who
want to hand over those powers
to the EU, allowing the laws
passed by our Parliament to beoverruled by the European Court
of Justice.
The very people suspending Par-
liament for little over a month are
doing so because they want Parlia-
ment’s power to be returned to it
in perpetuity.
It is the people who have been
sovereign in this country since the
mid-17th Century, as almost every
political philosopher has agreed
since the days of John Locke and
David Hume. We fought the Civil
War to establish that very principle,
overturning the divine right of
kings. When it is clearly articu-
lated, the will of the people trumps
that of Parliament and the Crown.
And in the referendum in June
2016, the people’s voice was clear.
At the heart of all these ironies
and hypocrisies, of course, is the
monstrous one about democracy.
How dare the Remainer oppo-
nents of prorogation denounce this
as an anti-democratic measure
when all they have done over the
past three years is work cease-
lessly and tirelessly to subvert the
will of the people?
John Bercow has called the pro-
rogation an ‘offence against the
democratic process’, but the real
offence has been the past three
years of rearguard actions.
What sort of democracy is it if
Remain campaigner Gina Millercan somehow manage to persuade
the courts to block Brexit? Is it dem-
ocratic to allow unelected judges to
stymie the will of the people?
Should that happen, the judiciary
will have been seen to assume pow-
ers that properly and historically
belong to the executive, something
that the great constitutional expert
and Reith lecturer Lord (Jonathan)
Sumption, himself a Remainer,
has rightly condemned.
If the demonstrators against the
prorogation had any sense of irony,
they would not be adopting the
umbrella symbol in an attempt to
equate their protests with those of
the demonstrators in Hong Kong.
The Remainers are at no risk of
being gunned down in their thou-
sands like the pro-democracy dem-
onstrators who face a tyrannous
Chinese communist regime. It is a
despicable mockery of the Hong
Kongers’ sublime bravery to try to
co-opt their symbol, and yet another
example of Remainers’ hyperbole.
So thank you, Boris, for giving us
such an enjoyable few days.
There has been more than a trace
of Margaret Thatcher about you.
Last week you acted with the same
kind of resolve that she showed dur-
ing the miners’ strike and the Falk-
lands War. Whoever said that you
were too desperate to be liked to be
an effective Prime Minister could
not have been more wrong.
You clearly have just that level of
steeliness that Thatcher showed
in the great foreign or domestic
crises of our country.Labour called
Boris a dictator
- but they have
never denounced
real dictators
What words would be used if there were a genuine
fascist threat? They’ve drained the lexicon dry
Remainers
have worked
ceaselessly to
subvert the will
of the people
15
By ANDREW ROBERTS
HISTORIAN AND BROADCASTERHow dare
Remainers
say Boris is
undemocratic.
His resolve
will hand
Parliament’s
power to the
people in
perpetuity